Women and the Politics of the Parish

The names of Sarah Bly and Alice Stubbs are not as familiar as the names of luminaries of the late nineteenth-century women’s suffrage movement. But they should be. Long before women had established a right to vote in municipal corporations, or had received the parliamentary franchise, these two widows had verified the right of women to vote in certain local elections and to serve for particular ancient local offices. Two landmark eighteenth-century cases before the court of the King’s Bench enshrined in law the right of women to vote for, and to hold, certain offices in local parishes. One of the reasons why the experiences of Bly and Stubbs have been overlooked by historians, is the chaotic nature of local government in England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland during this period, which has obscured the true picture of women’s rights in the local community. The Minister for the Poor Law Board in 1868, George Goschen, aptly described nineteenth-century British local government as ‘a chaos as regards Authorities, a chaos as regards rates, and a worse chaos than all as regards areas.’ ¹ The already baffling and complex structure of local governance that had emerged in the early modern period was compounded by additional bodies established in the nineteenth century. The new institutions often did not replace older forms of government, but stood alongside them, producing a multiplicity of competing organisations. Some bodies possessed overlapping powers, many of which were discretionary, and each had a different electorate and form of government. As with the parliamentary franchise, the local government electoral processes frequently depended upon custom and local precedent rather than regulation from the centre. For middle-class (and sometimes poor) women however, this chaotic and confused structure produced opportunities for them to participate, and to exercise authority, in their local neighbourhoods. Indeed, as Kathryn Gleadle has recently demonstrated ‘the parochial realm’ often provided women with more power than the home or the ‘bourgeois public sphere.’ ²